NHS Choices for professionals

Manage provider profiles

Many NHS organisations and independent health providers access their unique service profile on NHS Choices.

Your profile allows users to view hospitals, GP practices, CQC registered social care facilities and mental health services. It also provides users with a comprehensive directory in one place, searchable by postcode, name or address.

The FAQs below answer the most commonly asked questions about managing service profiles on NHS Choices and editing within the Provider Information Management System (PIMS). In addition we have created a series of user guides and videos.

What information can be displayed on a profile?

Organisations can manage and upload their own content to the profile, including images and videos. It is also a perfect opportunity to showcase any specialist services and facilities you provide.

Some of the information you should keep updated includes:

general information such as address, contact details and opening hours

appointment information – vacancies

information about facilities and services provided

your patient registration process

staff profiles

links to external websites that may be useful for patients

local news and health-related articles

practice surveys and patient participation information

Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection report

any service accreditations (such as Royal College of Psychiatrists CCQI awards)

images and videos

If you are a Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) you are also able to:

add information about services commissioned

add, hide or edit GP practices associated with your CCG

An important feature of your profile is the ability to view and respond to user comments, and feedback on your services. See our Manage user comments guidance for more information.

Profiles for cancer environments

NHS Choices is pleased to be working with Macmillan Cancer Support by providing service information profiles for cancer care environments that meet the Macmillan Quality Environment Mark ® (MQEM) standards.

As an MQEM awarded environment, you will be able to use the commenting and rating services to monitor your service through feedback and inform future application to the MQEM programme.As an award-winning cancer care environment you will need to ask your trust's web editor to either update your profile or to provide you with access to the editing system for you to update your own service profile on the NHS Choices site.

GP practices in London

If your practice is based in London, you may be aware of the myhealthlondon service led by NHS London. As part of an ongoing data-sharing project with NHS London, which focuses on GP information, we have added a news item to all London-based GP profiles. This highlights the profiles and additional indicators that are available at myhealthlondon. Practice editors are free to edit or remove this item.

How to get an account and/or editing rights?

All organisations have a profile template on NHS Choices and should have received their account, user name and password. The communications and IT team are usually the designated profile editors. If you want to find out who the administrator is for your organisation or wish to change the designated person, email our Service Desk via nhschoicesservicedesk@nhs.net.

GP practices

If you have not registered to manage your profile, then your profile is updated with data from the Primary Care Information Service (PRIMIS). If you then decide to manage your profile, these services will cease and you will become responsible for the information on your profile.

How can I delegate editing rights to another person?

Only one person per organisation can be assigned as the overall account manager, however the account manager can delegate to multiple editors. We verify our list of managers regularly and can reassign responsibility if necessary.

As soon as the manager has delegated permissions to an editor, they will be sent an email notifying them of their editing rights. This email will contain a username and password unless the person already has an NHS Choices account.

As the main account manager you will also be able to see a list of who has delegated permissions. Please note, there is no approval or preview functionality in the system, so you won't be able to sign-off changes made by people you delegated editing rights to.

Forgotten your password?

To reset your password click on the "Forgotten your password?" link displayed below the account log-in field. Enter the email address used to set up your account and click "Reset password". A new password will be emailed to you.

How do I edit a profile?

The editing pages look and feel like the front end and updates are made in real time making it easier for users to manage and amend their profile.

Log in with the username and password provided by our Service Desk when you registered for an account.

The editing mechanism adopts a "what you see is what you get" style of editing. The profile information is organised into modules. Modules you can edit will have a clearly marked "edit" button.

1. click the "edit" button on the module you wish to update

2. if you don't want to make changes, click the "cancel" button

3. once you are happy with your changes, click the "save" button

4. in the event you save changes by mistake, you can click the "undo" button

Some modules, such as centrally managed NHS Choices data, will be marked as "This cannot be edited". If it is possible to edit the data on a different page, it will be marked "How do I edit this?". Clicking on this button displays text explaining whether the module is centrally managed, or if the information can be edited in a different area of the site (such as reusable contact information).

You will be able to see any changes you make immediately, so you can judge how your pages look with certain fields populated.

How to add/remove services or departments

2. Click on the edit button to the right of the service you want to delete.

3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the "delete department" link displayed on the right.

Hospitals and clinics

The information about services and departments on your profile is derived from data supplied by the NHS e-Referral Service. You can add additional departments and services not included in NHS e-Referral, plus additional information about treatments. As a profile manager you can create a defined list of departments and services to ensure users can find the information you wish to promote, instead of using NHS e-Referral's treatment listings.

You can also remove a service listing from NHS e-Referral. Changes should be visible on your public profile within 24hrs.

We have services located in other trust/organisation's hospitals, does the system show that these services belong to our trust/organisation?

Once the ODS code for the service at that location is correct and belongs to your trust/org (i.e. the first 3 letters are your trust/org's ODS code), it should be listed as belonging to you. If you do not have the correct code, then contact the service desk at nhschoicesservicedesk@nhs.net.

Pharmacies

The service descriptions on your profile have been created by the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee to ensure pharmacy teams use standard paragraphs to populate the service pages on their profile. This will help people when navigating services on NHS Choices. Download the service descriptions for pharmacy teams (PDF, 258kb).

We have over 200 services at our trust – am I expected to add them all?

We don't expect this system to be able to represent the full scope of your sites and services. We advise editors to prioritise the information by what is most important or most likely to be accessed by the public. Finer details and specific information about a service can be added as a narrative in the text boxes provided.

Hospitals vs clinics in PIMS

What is the difference between hospitals and clinics in PIMS?

We categorise sites as hospitals or clinics. Hospitals are sites with overnight stay facilities. Everything else is categorised as a clinic. However, they could also be units, community centres, GP surgery etc.

How do I change a clinic to a hospital type?

We spotted clinics and hospitals that don't belong to our organisation. Why is this and can I delete them?

There are several reasons why you will have sites in your profile that your trust/organisation does not manage. Mostly it is historical data that either existed before a trust merged or was added by editors that preceded you. Editors do not have the permission to delete sites. However, you can hide them from public view.

In exceptional cases, such as having an unusually high number of hidden clinics or hospitals, our Service Desk may be able to delete them for you.

How can I add missing hospitals and clinics to our profile?

If there are clinics or hospitals missing from your profile, contact our Service Desk team who will help you get these added. Please include your ODS codes in your email.

How can I avoid duplicating information that is already available on our own website?

NHS Choices does not currently have the facility to syndicate content from local websites to the national site. However, you can syndicate all the information from your NHS Choices profile to your own website. To get further details on how this works read our syndication information.

In the meantime, we suggest adding hyperlinks on your NHS Choices profile directing patients back to your website.

How do I obtain web stats for a profile?

Once you've logged into your account, the number of visits to your profile is displayed at the bottom of each page. This is split into the numbers for the current month and the past 12 months.

I’m having trouble adding our videos to the site

If you are having trouble loading a video to your profile, check that you have met the necessary requirements:

MP4 files are preferred

max size 100Mb

aspect ratio of 16:9

Try a lower resolution option if this doesn't work. There are lots of free sites where you can convert YouTube and Vimeo links to lower resolution MP4 files.